Before signing away tariffs on “noncritical” items, the Secretary should walk the aisles of a Costco and read the country-of-origin stickers on the metal. Not just the cheap plastic stuff either, but consumer goods made of metal: gun safes, stainless-steel tumblers, vacuum cleaners, toasters, air fryers, coffee makers, stand mixers, and blenders. These are all items beyond the scope of Section 232 steel and aluminum tariffs, and for which we are apparently contemplating a permanent outsourcing to China.
The border data on these goods tell the same story as the toys and monitors above. Across the non-232 metal consumer lines — safes, insulated drinkware, vacuums, small kitchen appliances — China still ships roughly half a billion dollars a month, and declared unit values are about 12% below their July 2024, pre-tariff levels. Stainless vacuum bottles, the ur-Costco item, are the picture of the pattern: Chinese shipments up 12% by count over the past year, declared values still a fifth below where they stood before any of these tariffs existed. The vendors absorbed the duty; the American consumer never paid it; cutting it refunds nothing to anyone in America.
Why does a safe or a stand mixer matter to national security? The government already answered that question, in writing.
The Section 232 steel report highlighted that military spending accounts for only about 3% of U.S. steel production. The mills and their workforce that serve defense procurement are the same mills and workforce serving the commercial market, so the industry’s commercial viability is the national-security asset, with 80% capacity utilization the threshold of survival.
The aluminum report made the point even more starkly: defense-grade smelting capacity exists only because commercial demand keeps the smelters alive. Mills and smelters do not run on fighter-jet orders; they run on the regular business embodied in everyday metal goods. To their credit, the U.S. Department of Commerce acted on that logic throughout 2025 — adding gas grills, steel cookware, cutlery, and metal furniture to the 232 derivative lists.
The pace of adding downstream items slowed to a crawl in 2026, unfortunately. The metal consumer items still outside the 232 wall are the next acre of that same commercial base. Cutting their China tariffs — the only tariff they have — would send a signal to the market that the United States was permanently ceding them to China, and every ton of steel and aluminum inside them would be struck from the order books of American mills for good. Handicap the base, and you handicap everything built on it.
Cutting China Tariffs Won’t Cut Prices
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says the United States and China are considering lowering tariffs on “noncritical” items — the consumer goods that fill American shopping carts — as part of the package being assembled around this week’s Trump-Xi summit. Reporting on the talks describes moving certain Chinese goods back to most-favored-nation rates, covering some $30 billion in trade.
The implied promise is that American consumers will feel relief at the register.
They won’t.
Census data makes it plain: for consumer goods from China, the tariffs were never being paid out of American wallets. Chinese vendors absorbed them by cutting the values they declared to U.S. Customs.
The contemplated tariff cut on “noncritical” items would serve only to deliver a windfall between $6 and $17 billion annually to select Chinese vendors, depending on the scale of the cuts.
What five more months of customs data show
In June we showed that the celebrated “collapse” in the value of Chinese imports was not what it appeared: declared customs value fell 33% in March year-over-year while the quantity of actual imports was up.
Too often, Census “value” statistics are conflated with other price indexes that track real market prices. But customs “value” is a self-declaration by the importer, and under an ad valorem tariff, the person making the customs declaration is strongly incentivized to make that declaration as low as possible..
Subsequent Census data on Chinese imports have continued the “value down, quantity-up” pattern. Matching every 10-digit tariff line with quantity data in both years — roughly 9,100 to 9,500 lines a month, about 90% of import value — and applying a conservative screen that discards statistical flukes.
2025 versus 2026 Year-over-year, matched HTS-10 lines
Mar
Apr
May
Jun
Jul
Declared customs value
−33.0%
−25.9%
+14.3%
+32.9%
−1.1%
Physical quantity (value-weighted, conservative)
−6.8%
−5.9%
+34.0%
+47.4%
+7.3%
Implied declared unit value
−28.5%
−21.3%
−14.8%
−10.2%
−8.0%
July is the month that settles the argument. The 2025 comparison months of May and June were distorted by the springtime tariff spike; July 2025 was a normal month. Yet the pattern held: physical volumes up 7.3%, declared unit values still 8% below a year earlier.
Across March through July, importers declared roughly $42 billion less than 2026’s physical volumes would have been worth at 2025’s own declared prices. Whatever is driving Chinese declared prices relentlessly downward, it is not cost.
And it is not the currency, either — the one alibi that might have explained falling dollar prices innocently. The yuan has not devalued; it has done the opposite, strengthening from ¥7.17 to ¥6.78 per dollar between July 2025 and July 2026, and about 7% since pre-tariff July 2024. A stronger yuan should push dollar-denominated prices up. Instead they fell — which means that in their own currency, Chinese vendors’ declared receipts per unit are down roughly 13% in a year, and that $2.19 toy that became a $1.52 toy represents a 36% cut in yuan.
The consumer-goods test: border prices are lower than before the tariffs existed
If American consumers were paying these tariffs, you would see it at the border first: declared prices holding steady or rising, with the duty stacked on top. So we ran the test on consumer goods specifically. We assembled a basket of roughly 2,550 tariff lines of recognizable retail merchandise — toys, apparel, footwear, luggage, furniture, tableware, cookware, small appliances, electronics, holiday goods — and compared July 2026 against July 2024, the last summer before the 2025 tariff wall went up.
The result: declared unit values on Chinese consumer goods are 15% below their pre-tariff level. Not 15% plus the tariff — 15% below where they stood before the tariffs existed, after two years of general inflation. Line after line tells the same story:
Consumer item (HTS-10)
Declared unit value, July 2024
July 2026
Change
Toys, ages 3–12 (9503000073)
$2.19
$1.52
−31%
Computer monitors (8528520000)
$143.72
$98.57
−31%
Headphones/earphones (8518302000)
$8.88
$5.07
−43%
Video game consoles (9504500000)
$88.82
$29.22
−67%
Christmas ornaments (9505102500)
$2.86
$2.47
−14%
Upholstered wooden-frame seats (9401616011)
$63.08
$29.20
−54%
Made-up textile articles (6307909891)
$0.73
$0.55
−25%
Metal household furniture (9403200050)
$12.99
$10.98
−16%
A $2.19 toy did not become a $1.52 toy because Chinese factories discovered a 31% efficiency gain. These are the declarations on which a 30-to-50-percent ad valorem duty is computed. Some of the decline is Chinese vendors genuinely eating the tariff to hold their U.S. shelf positions; some of it is declarations compressed to shrink the duty bill. Either way, the conclusion for Secretary Bessent is the same: the tariff has not been passing through to American consumers. Retail prices did not spike when these duties arrived — the administration itself has spent a year pointing that out — because the exporters’ side of the ledger absorbed them, one way or another, at the border.
None of this should surprise anyone who read the business pages last year. When the tariffs hit, America’s largest retailers said openly that their vendors would eat them: Walmart demanded price cuts from its Chinese suppliers of as much as 10% per tariff round, and Home Depot announced it would hold prices and expected suppliers to bear the cost. The most telling reaction came from Beijing, which summoned Walmart’s executives to protest — and Walmart kept the pressure on anyway.
Cut the tariff, and the windfall goes to Shenzhen
Follow the incidence. A tariff is a wedge between what the Chinese vendor receives and what the importer of record pays. The data show the wedge has been coming out of the vendor’s side: declared border prices fell by roughly the amount needed to keep landed, duty-paid costs — and therefore U.S. retail prices — about the same.
Remove the tariff and Treasury delivers a windfall to Shenzhen: Census’s duty calculations show $5.4 billion collected on Chinese goods in July alone — a $65-billion-a-year pace — with consumer goods contributing about $1.4 billion a month, or $17 billion a year. Relief covering the reported $30 billion of “noncritical” trade would forgo roughly $6 billion a year at prevailing rates; sweep in Chinese consumer goods generally and the cost approaches the full $17 billion. This is real money against the deficits Secretary Bessent manages. Chinese vendors pocket the difference — a direct, legislated windfall to the very exporters whose pricing conduct is at issue.
"Noncritical" is exactly wrong: walk through a Costco
Before signing away tariffs on “noncritical” items, the Secretary should walk the aisles of a Costco and read the country-of-origin stickers on the metal. Not just the cheap plastic stuff either, but consumer goods made of metal: gun safes, stainless-steel tumblers, vacuum cleaners, toasters, air fryers, coffee makers, stand mixers, and blenders. These are all items beyond the scope of Section 232 steel and aluminum tariffs, and for which we are apparently contemplating a permanent outsourcing to China.
The border data on these goods tell the same story as the toys and monitors above. Across the non-232 metal consumer lines — safes, insulated drinkware, vacuums, small kitchen appliances — China still ships roughly half a billion dollars a month, and declared unit values are about 12% below their July 2024, pre-tariff levels. Stainless vacuum bottles, the ur-Costco item, are the picture of the pattern: Chinese shipments up 12% by count over the past year, declared values still a fifth below where they stood before any of these tariffs existed. The vendors absorbed the duty; the American consumer never paid it; cutting it refunds nothing to anyone in America.
Why does a safe or a stand mixer matter to national security? The government already answered that question, in writing.
The Section 232 steel report highlighted that military spending accounts for only about 3% of U.S. steel production. The mills and their workforce that serve defense procurement are the same mills and workforce serving the commercial market, so the industry’s commercial viability is the national-security asset, with 80% capacity utilization the threshold of survival.
The aluminum report made the point even more starkly: defense-grade smelting capacity exists only because commercial demand keeps the smelters alive. Mills and smelters do not run on fighter-jet orders; they run on the regular business embodied in everyday metal goods. To their credit, the U.S. Department of Commerce acted on that logic throughout 2025 — adding gas grills, steel cookware, cutlery, and metal furniture to the 232 derivative lists.
The pace of adding downstream items slowed to a crawl in 2026, unfortunately. The metal consumer items still outside the 232 wall are the next acre of that same commercial base. Cutting their China tariffs — the only tariff they have — would send a signal to the market that the United States was permanently ceding them to China, and every ton of steel and aluminum inside them would be struck from the order books of American mills for good. Handicap the base, and you handicap everything built on it.
What to do instead
These tariffs were never premised on protection alone — they were revenue tariffs from the start, and the data show they are performing exactly as revenue tariffs should: collected at the border, absorbed by overseas producers, invisible to the American consumer. The President said as much on day one. The America First Trade Policy Memorandum directed the Secretary to investigate establishing an External Revenue Service precisely because this administration has prioritized displacing internal taxes with tariff revenue. Treasury does not need new authority to act on that direction: as we have documented, Section 412 of the Homeland Security Act preserved the Secretary’s authority over customs revenue — defined to reach all aspects of tariff policy — when customs enforcement moved to DHS. Congress even directed Treasury to appoint up to twenty officials to oversee customs revenue. A quarter-century later, those roles still sit unfilled.
So here is a better use of the Secretary’s China energies. Fill the twenty seats. Then put that team to work the way one of his greatest predecessors did. In 1815, Congress asked Treasury Secretary Alexander J. Dallas for a tariff plan; his 1816 report to Congress sorted American industry into classes, matched each to the tariff it needed, and became the Tariff of 1816. Bessent’s team has a tool Dallas could only dream of: monthly Census data on every one of 13,000 tariff lines. Set them loose on it to identify where tariffs are generating what amounts to free revenue — duties absorbed entirely by overseas producers, as the consumer-goods data above demonstrate — and send Congress a report recommending those rates be codified as permanent revenue tariffs, just as Dallas did. (They might start by asking Census to publish the billion dollars a month of Chinese parcels that still enter the statistics with no commodity detail.)
Codification would do one more thing worth noting at this week’s summit: it would put the U.S.-China trade relationship on calmer footing. Today’s tariffs rest on accusations — fentanyl trafficking, unfair trade practices, emergency findings about Beijing’s conduct. A revenue tariff rests on none of that. It is premised on America’s own fiscal needs, applies without indictment, and gives neither side an emergency to escalate or a grievance to nurse. Beijing can hardly object to the United States funding its government the way every government funded itself before the income tax — and the way the President has said he wants to again.
The one thing the data cannot support is the comfortable idea now circulating at Treasury: that cutting tariffs on Chinese consumer goods is a gift to American families. It is a gift, all right — mailed to the wrong address.
MADE IN AMERICA.
CPA is the leading national, bipartisan organization exclusively representing domestic producers and workers across many industries and sectors of the U.S. economy.
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